Days before David Petraeus resigned from his post as director of the CIA for having an extramarital affair, The Daily Beast’s Newsreek Newsweek column published the general’s “Rules for Living” as documented by his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell.

Golf superstar Tiger Woods has stayed out of the public eye since the news about his expansive infidelity scandal broke last Thanksgiving, but on Friday, an apparently penitent Woods made a brief appearance and a sober apology at a press conference before returning to continue his treatment program. Reactions to his show of contrition, perhaps unsurprisingly, were mixed.

Are Americans sacrificing the possibility of a more tolerant humanity for a suffocating guarantee of fidelity, a frigid prospect that seemingly unites the commissars of the politically correct left as much as it does the thought police of the puritanical right?